Persistent storage devices such as solid state drives (SSDs) may have performance characteristics that depend on various factors, such as the extent to which storage areas of the device have been marked as invalid, or the number of programming and erase cycles to which physical blocks of the storage areas device have been subjected. In some applications performance which is on occasion significantly faster than average, or faster than expected, may be inconvenient.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for achieving consistent performance in a storage device.